Ridiculously Good Homemade Steak Sauce

To cater a small wedding reception, my wife made beef tenderloin and this steak sauce she found at Saveur magazine online. It sounds like a cookie recipe, with allspice, cinnamon and cloves, but the ingredient that really gives this steak sauce its kick is tamarind, jacked up with a little vodka.

The tamarind is a bushy tree, originally from Africa, that produces pods containing seeds the size of large cherries. They have a sweet and sour flavor, oddly enough a bit like steak sauce. It’s a popular ingredient in Latin America and many Latin stores carry not only tamarind seed pods but processed tamarind pulp and a beverage flavored with tamarind. We often see the pods in the exotic fruit section at the local Harris Teeter’s. But not on this occasion, I walked a good piece before finally finding an Hispanic grocery in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of D.C. that had bulk tamarind pods for sale.